Mondelez International and Reckitt warn of economic impact of cyber attack on sales

Cyber attacks could have a significant impact on businesses, Mondelez International and Reckitt warn of NotPetya effect on the sales.

Cyber attacks could have a significant impact on businesses, and two of the world’s largest consumer goods companies confirmed it. On Thursday the companies Mondelez and Reckitt Benckiser warned of the impact of the NotPetya attack on their revenues.

Mondelez International is one of the world’s largest snacks companies, its products include the Oreo cookies and Cadbury chocolates. The company estimated the NotPetya attack would cut three percentage points from second-quarter sales growth because of disruptions to shipping and invoices caused by the cyber attack.

The company declared that its shipping and invoicing was disrupted during the last four days of Q2.

Considering that Mondelez International’s net revenues were $6.4bn in Q1, it is possible to quantify the overall economic impact of a cyber attack.

“There are a few markets where we have permanently lost some of that revenue due to holiday feature timing, but we expect we will be able to recognize the majority of these delayed shipments in our third quarter results,” Mondelez said on Thursday.

The company confirmed that employees in different regions were experiencing technical problems, but it is still unclear whether the issues were linked to the massive ransomware-based attack.

Mondelez believes it will incur in other costs in the second and third quarters due to the cyber attacks.

Another company, the Reckitt Benckiser, maker of Nurofen painkillers and Durex condoms, said it expected sales would be hit Q2 by an estimated £110m this year.

“It projecting a second quarter like-for-like sales drop of 2 per cent, cutting annual revenue growth by a full percentage point.” states the Financial Times. “Reckitt cautioned that this was not a final estimate since it had not yet recovered fully from the attack.”

Other major firms hit by the cyber attack faced similar problems, including the world’s largest shipping company AP Moller-Maersk and one of the world’s biggest law firms, the DLA Piper-

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Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer.
Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US.
Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines.
Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.